“It isn’t going to be all that easy,” suggested the major.
“I don’t care whether it’s easy or not,” the colonel told him. “I just want it done. And it’s your job to do it.”
The major nodded, unruffled. He’d known Jim Brice for twelve years. He understood that the colonel’s abruptness wasn’t so much the result of a nasty personality as it was the result of his single-minded desire to get the job done. The major realized that no offense was intended, and so no offense was taken.
“I’ll do the job,” he told the colonel. “Or at least I’ll take a healthy stab at it.”
“A healthy stab isn’t enough. I want that boy’s ability out on the surface, where I can get some use out of it.”
“You talk as though you owned him,” the major chided gently.
“I do,” said the colonel. “I own his ability, at any rate. Or I will, once you dig it out for me.”
“Own it?”
“I’ll get the use of it,” said the colonel. “I can’t teleport myself, but I don’t have to, not if I have someone else who can do it for me. I’ll get the use of his ability, and what’s that if it isn’t ownership?”
“If I didn’t know you better,” the major said, “I’d think you were power-mad.”
“Not power-mad. Power-hungry. That I am. I have a job to do, and a tricky job, and I need all the power I can get, in order to do that job. And I need the power locked up in that boy’s mind.”
“Us slaves do O.K.,” said Ed Clark, grinning.
“I own his ability,” said the colonel, pointing at Ed. “I get to use it through him, and he doesn’t feel as though I’m some sort of evil mastermind. Do you, Ed?”
“Sure I do,” said Clark, the grin even broader “than before. “But it’s worth it, to get to wear civvies and eat in the BOQ.”
“It’s a pity,” said the colonel, “that brains and psi-talent don’t always go together.”
“Simple Simon met a psi-man,” said Clark.
Paul Swanson spoke up for the first time. “Simple Simon was a psi-man,” he said. He looked at Clark. “Hi, Simon.”
“Knock it off,” said the colonel. He looked back at the major. “What do you intend to do with this boy?”
“Run him through the mill,” said Grildquist. “Give him the hurry-up-and-wait routine, and wait for him to realize he’s on the treadmill. He isn’t going to cough up that ability you want until he realizes it’s the only way he’s going to get off the treadmill.”
“How long?” demanded the colonel.
The major shrugged. “A finite time,” he said. “If I try to rush him too fast, he’s liable to react in the opposite direction, shove the whole thing so far down into the subconscious we’ll never get it out.”
“I want that boy,” said the colonel grimly.
“Patience, Jim,” said the major. “Patience. I’ll give him to you on a silver platter.”
After that first interview with the new psychiatrist, Major Grildquist, Jeremy was completely ignored for three days. He spent most of his time in the floor dayroom, playing Ping-pong or pinochle with other patients, reading old magazines, and writing reassuring letters to his parents. He didn’t want them to know yet what had happened to him, so he told them he’d caught a flu bug of some kind, it was nothing serious, but he’d probably be in the hospital for a few days.
And he waited for the psychiatrists to cure him. He wanted to be cured, and the other psychiatrist had said that that was half the battle.
But nothing happened. He waited, and waited, and waited, and nothing happened.
Until the afternoon of the fourth day. Then he was transferred from the eight-man ward to a single room.
By this time, he knew the hospital scuttlebutt. A man in a ward was relatively healthy, and could expect either to be discharged from the service on a medical, or be returned to duty in a short time.
But a man in a single room wasn’t healthy at all. A man in a single room could expect either to stay there for a long while or get a section eight discharge and be transferred to a Veterans Administration hospital.
The room he was transferred to was small, squarish, pale gray and Spartan. An army cot, with blue Air Force blankets, a metal bureau, and a metal armless chair with upholstered seat, was all the furniture in the room. There was an ashtray atop the bureau, and he was allowed to smoke.
He did so. He paced the floor, and smoked, and worried, and tried to get this whole thing straightened out in his mind.
He was in a hospital, and he was clearly one step from an insane asylum. And yet he was the same person he’d been all his life, with the same attitudes and memories and beliefs. He hadn’t suddenly started seeing little green men or believing that he was being persecuted, he hadn’t gone raging around with a knife, or gone around setting buildings on fire. He hadn’t retreated into an unreachable corner of his brain, and he hadn’t developed a second personality, and he hadn’t started believing he was the lost heir to the Tasmanian throne, having been stolen as an infant by gypsies.
He was one short step from an insane asylum, and he had given none of the indications of insanity that he had ever heard of or could possibly recognize. So, why was he one step from an insane asylum?
Because he had traveled seven hundred miles in much less than a second. He had done it twice, once going and once coming. He hadn’t intended to do it, he didn’t know how he had managed to do it, and he fervently wished he’d never done it. But it had happened, and he remembered it and believed his memory, and that’s why he was moving slowly but steadily toward an insane asylum.
Teleportation. That was the word. There was, at least, a word for it, even though nobody believed in it, just as there was a word for luck even though nobody really believed in the powers of luck good or bad, and just as there had been a word for spaceship long before people believed that things like sputniks and moon shots were really possible.
Now, here was the crux of the matter. Was teleportation a thing like luck, something that nobody believed in with just cause. In other words, had he teleported himself home and back, or was he nuts?
He paced the floor and smoked, paced the floor and smoked, and tried to work it all out to a sensible conclusion. He already knew all the arguments in favor of his having teleported — the absolute reality of the second spent at home, the letter from his mother, his own conviction — and now he listed against them the arguments in favor of delusion and madness.
First, and most obvious, where had this mysterious talent suddenly come from? If he’d teleported, why didn’t he know how he’d done it, and why couldn’t he do it again? For that matter, why hadn’t he done it before? If it required fear, he’d been afraid before in his life. The time out hiking as a Boy Scout, for instance, when he’d almost fallen over a cliff. The night he was in the car with Steve Chalmers and a couple of other guys, and Steve was high as a kite, and drove so madly down that mountain road toward town. Lots of times. If he could do it at all, why hadn’t he done it long ago, and why couldn’t he do it again now?”
Second, if he had really gone home, why hadn’t he stayed there? Admitted, at that particular moment, in that drainage pipe, he had wished more than anything in the world to be safe at home, but if he had really succeeded in fulfilling that desire, why had he come right back?
Third, if he was going to go around thinking he was unique, some sort of superman with strange powers possessed by no one but himself, then he was a candidate for the twitch factory, and no questions asked. If he had the power to teleport, that must almost inevitably mean that other people had the power to teleport. Why hadn’t they? After thousands of years of recorded history, why hadn’t somebody somewhere along the line proved that teleportation was not a thing like luck?